Thread by @c_valenzuelab

We are beyond the tipping point. AI is becoming the foundational layer upon which most creative work will be built.

Right now, the question is not whether most media will be generated, but how quickly. The progress we see is not slowing, quite the opposite. Real-time generation, hyper-personalized worlds, interactive narratives shaped by the viewer, these are coming soon, most likely in the next 24 months. Every artist I speak with is fascinated. Every media company is building a plan. To ignore this is to ignore reality.

Given the pace, I'm worried that we are not fully engaging in the conversations we need to be having, especially in creative industries. Many are staring at the point when we should be studying the curve. The popular discourse is a distraction, mired in anxieties that miss the larger picture.

Take, for example, the most common question I get asked in panels and press interviews: jobs. While this is a valid question, I think it has become the wrong premise for thinking about what's coming. It underestimates the nature of change. Or represents a failure of imagination. Art is the history of technology. Every artist or creative has used some form of technology to do their work. Many of today's creative jobs were created because of major technological shifts: the painter's canvas, the photographer's lens, the filmmaker's camera, the software to make movies, each new tool changed the labor of creation, as it always has. Did the alarm clock industry fight for the rights of the knocker-up, the human alarm clocks of the industrial age? No. We don't need to protect jobs. We need to protect people.

Technology changes jobs. It always has. The real conversation is not about replacement, but about emergence. The camera did not make painting or theater irrelevant. It created a new medium that lives alongside them. AI is not the end of media. It is the beginning of a new one. And with it comes an entire new category and volume of jobs. How do we prepare for those new opportunities? How do we train people to adapt to a new reality and for jobs that don't really exist yet? That is a far better question to be obsessing over.

The other great fear is the flood, the sheer amount of content we should expect to see. History has proven this is not new. In 1853, critics warned that the incredibly large number of 5,500 new novels released in a year represented an impossible deluge of content. It felt like too much. Who's going to read that many books? Discussions around capping book production were held. Of course, we can all agree the world is a better place with more novels being published. In 2024, it's estimated that around 2.2 to 2.4 million new books were published worldwide, including all formats like print, ebooks, and audiobooks. And for that volume of books, we built systems to navigate the noise: reviews, libraries, editors, awards. We created curation.
Sturgeon's Law has always held that ninety percent of everything is crap. AI doesn't create this problem, it merely changes the scale. The slop is not new. Our tools to filter it will have to be.

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about how to best encourage discussions about what we need to be thinking about. Here is a framework for what I would invite more discussion around:

1. New Economies. When the core mechanics of creation become automated, the economics must shift. The value moves from technical execution to vision, taste, and direction. If you were the president of the Knocker-Up Society, your job wouldn't be to fight the alarm clock. It would be to figure out what your members, people who understand schedules and discipline, could do next. You don't fight the future. You build the new economy on top of it.

2. New Media and New Aesthetics. We are entering a post-stylistic era. The first wave of AI media imitates what came before, just as the first photographs were treated like paintings. But soon, the hyper-cinematic, perfectly lit, impossibly polished aesthetic will feel generic. The overwhelming sameness will become boring. True innovation will come from those who break away from imitation and discover aesthetics native to the medium itself. Who are the ones pushing those artistic and aesthetic frontiers? How do we promote and encourage new media formats to emerge?

3. New Curation. As the volume of content becomes infinite, curation becomes paramount. The editor, the critic, the influencer, the algorithm, these roles become more critical than ever. The most valuable skill in a world of infinite creation is the ability to find the signal in the noise. The new media landscape will be defined not just by what is made, but by what is chosen. How will those curation systems work? What needs to change in order to navigate the volume of content we expect to see?

While not comprehensive, I believe in and invite more people to think about these questions—the ones about creative malleability and adaptation, about growth and artistic potential. We are beyond the tipping point, and AI has become the most misunderstood technology of our time. This is partially because AI is a technological Rorschach test. It is so malleable that we project onto it all our hopes, our fears, our politics, and our anxieties. The debate is rarely about the technology itself. It's a performative act, a projection of our own worldview.

I'm an optimist, and if you show me a Rorschach inkblot image, I see a flourishing creative world and artistic revolution. And I see the beginning of understanding what we truly want from art, from media, from AI, and from each other.